It was Thanksgiving Day 1993 at my daughter Debbie’s home in Northwood, England. The mince pie was finished and her husband, Lieutenant Commander Don Blake, who was assigned to British Intelligence (MI-6), said we were invited next door to have a few brandies at the home of Aidan MacCarthy, a retired air commodore (brigadier general).

Aidan and his wife, Kathleen, were wonderful hosts. Aidan, in his 70s, had the hint of a perpetual smile on his Gaelic face. He stoked the fire and made sure everyone’s glass was never empty.

We chatted about England and of course about Ireland, where he was born. He had a summer place in West Cork on Bantry Bay. He did not talk about the war. It was only later that I learned what he had been through in World War II. His is a tale of raw courage, suffering, confinement, valor and pure survival. It’s almost unbelievable. Here is his story.

After graduating from Cork Medical School in 1938, MacCarthy, unable to obtain a medical appointment in Ireland because of local professional nepotism, headed to Wales, then to London, to work in dispensaries. Disillusioned with private practice, he met two other doctors who had qualified with him in Ireland. The three sat in a garden in Leicester Square debating the pros and cons of medical careers in one of the British armed services. Their argument continued throughout a night of West End bar hopping and ended in the Coconut Grove nightclub. There, in the early hours, one of the hostesses flipped a coin to decide between the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy. The RAF won.

When war was declared on Germany in September 1939, Flight Lt. MacCarthy was shipped with his squadron to northern France. Their planes were a mixture of wooden-prop Hawker Hurricane and biplane Gloster Gladiator fighters, and Blenheim and Lysander bombers. In May 1940 the Germans began their drive through the Belgian and Dutch lowlands. Soon to be overrun, the British and French armies started a hurried retreat. MacCarthy’s convoy of 15 vehicles headed toward Amiens, constantly strafed by German fighters and dive-bombed by Junkers Ju-87 Stukas. They were diverted toward Boulogne as German panzers raced to cut them off. Crowds of refugees hindered MacCarthy’s convoy. He watched helplessly as men, women and children were mowed down or blown to bits by attacking planes.

As the convoy neared Calais, orders were given to make haste to Dunkirk. The strafing and bombing continued, and the German tank divisions closed to within a mile of the convoy. MacCarthy and his medical corpsmen were issued rifles and told to dig foxholes and prepare for a siege. Confusion reigned, and MacCarthy made his way to town to look for a headquarters and some information. He found the town a burning shambles. Thousands of French and British troops wandered around in a daze. On the third day, with food, water and nerves running short, MacCarthy and his group, together with regular army troops, were herded onto a ferry that pulled quickly away from the jetty. When the ferry was a mile out in the channel, a torpedo ripped into the vessel, causing numerous casualties. MacCarthy and his colleagues converted the dining room into a makeshift operating theater, using tables that were fixed to the floor. There was a gaping hole at the waterline, and the captain ordered most of the troops to move to the other side of the ship. Thus tilted, the ferry somehow made its way to England.

Following evacuation from France, MacCarthy was posted to RAF Honington in East Anglia as senior medical officer, with the rank of squadron leader (major). In August 1940 the Luftwaffe hit the air base, causing great damage and numerous casualties. MacCarthy again operated day in and day out.

In May 1941 MacCarthy almost lost his life, an event that he remembers in grim detail. On a dark night a British bomber was returning from a raid on Germany. The inexperienced pilot radioed that the red and green alert on his instrument panel indicated that his landing gear was locked in the up position. The fire brigade swung into action, and MacCarthy rushed toward the nearest ambulance. The situation was further complicated by a German fighter on the bomber’s tail, and the pilot was warned not to use landing lights in his descent. The bomber came over the boundary fence too fast, its starboard wing clipped the ground and the ship cartwheeled. The cockpit was nearly obliterated, and instantly everything was a mass of flame. MacCarthy and the ambulance crew raced into the burning wreckage, which was lying on a bomb dump. Fearing an explosion at any moment, they dragged out the badly burned aircrew. The pilot was clearly dead, and as MacCarthy described it, ‘I wept for his inexperience and his mistakes and his lost youth. The bombs did not explode, and when we staggered clear, we knew that only a heaven-sent miracle had preserved us.’

For his valor in the rescue, MacCarthy was awarded the George Medal, presented by His Majesty, King George VI, at Buckingham Palace in November 1941. On the eve of the presentation, MacCarthy’s commanding officer had made him responsible for three bomber pilots who were being awarded Distinguished Flying Crosses the same day. His orders were explicit. Get them to the palace–sober–properly dressed and on time. Following a very hectic evening of West End bar hopping, MacCarthy managed to get his contingent dressed and to the palace on time–and ‘we were all reasonably sober,’ he recalled.

Orders now came from the Air Ministry to ship MacCarthy’s wing to North Africa to operate with the Free French. The wing included Supermarine Spitfires and Hawker Hurricanes, their goal to clear the Pantelleria Channel between Malta and Alexandria. They set sail aboard the transport Warwick Castle in a convoy, then left the convoy to make a dash for Gibraltar. But the ship was rerouted to South Africa. After spending a week at Cape Town, they joined another convoy and were told to sail to Singapore with all speed to help stem the Japanese invasion of Malaya.

As MacCarthy’s convoy approached the Sunda Strait between Sumatra and Java, news of the Japanese shelling of Singapore caused it to be diverted to Batavia, on Java. There they unloaded and reassembled the Hurricanes and Spitfires.

Remotely distant from the war zone, they stretched their legs, drank cold beer and discovered that most of the Dutch spoke English. The only peril was an occasional stray tiger. But then MacCarthy’s unit was ordered to move again. This time they flew to Palembang, in eastern Sumatra, where 30 Royal Australian Air Force Lockheed A-28 Hudson bombers were waiting. The elation was short-lived; Japanese soldiers were parachuting into the jungle that surrounded the airfield.

When the Japanese attacked, the Dutch blew up the airfield’s petroleum tanks and supporting piers, and MacCarthy, with many of his group wounded, retreated on a jungle road 280 miles south to Oosthaven, on the Sunda Strait. There were no signposts, but plenty of monkeys, tigers and crocodiles for company. At Oosthaven chaos reigned, with more fires, clouds of black smoke and burning oil storage tanks. Three small KLM ferry boats evacuated MacCarthy’s group across the straits to Java. By then there were 10,000 Allied troops on Java, but they were underarmed and lacked skill in handling their weaponry. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, in a radio broadcast, urged the men to hold out for as long as possible.

The Japanese invasion of Java took place in four separate landings, meeting with minimal opposition from the Dutch and American defenders. The Americans included a Texas field artillery battalion and survivors of a ship that had been sunk by Japanese bombers. MacCarthy and his men again beat a hasty retreat into the mountains. Dysentery and malaria weakened their ranks. The end was soon to come. MacCarthy recalled: ‘On the fifth day, as the sun climbed into the azure sky, the Japanese suddenly appeared on our rear flank. Soon they were walking among us, without a shot being fired. It seemed more like a dream than reality.’

It was March 1942, and 4,000 English and Australian defenders were marched down the mountain and across the plains. In the tropical heat they were herded onto packed trains, ending up at a captured Dutch airfield. The Japanese guards were battle-hardened, well-disciplined front-line troops. MacCarthy was impressed by their lack of animosity. But that soon changed. The front-line troops were replaced by more brutal guards. MacCarthy soon learned that the strictest code of Asian culture was the concept of ‘face’ and ‘loss of face.’ ‘Face’ now began to dominate the captors’ attitude toward their prisoners. If the commandant lost his temper, he slapped the sergeant. The sergeant slapped the nearest corporal, the corporal the private. The private kicked the nearest Korean. The Korean punched the POW. This system saved ‘face’ all the way down the line.

MacCarthy and his troops were now divided into work crews and put to work laying a runway on the grass airstrip. Some days later, the Japanese ordered all members of the aircrew to line up and fill out a detailed questionnaire on aircrew training. The senior British officer, a wing commander pilot, refused to allow these forms to be completed. He was taken to the guardroom and beaten. An assembly was sounded, he was paraded in front of the POWs and they then witnessed his death by firing squad. It was a brutal augury of things to come.

One day while MacCarthy and his work group were toiling at the airfield, a Japanese light bomber landed for fuel, taxiing close to where MacCarthy was working. While awaiting fuel, the pilot, who looked tall for a Japanese, stood nearby smoking a cigarette. The plane resembled an RAF Blenheim light bomber. One of the prisoners, an RAF Blenheim pilot, casually suggested that the four of them jump the Japanese pilot, hijack the plane and make a dash for Australia. Just as they were about to carry out the plan, the Japanese pilot turned toward them, patted his holstered service revolver and in perfect English with a pronounced American accent said, ‘Forget it.’ He climbed back into his plane and taxied away. They could only surmise that he was a nisei–born in the United States–who had returned to fight for the emperor.

Next the captives were marched to a railroad and again herded into closed trains. After a horrendous 16-hour journey they arrived at Soerabaja, on eastern Java, and MacCarthy stayed there for several months. Once he saluted one of a guard’s pet monkeys. The guard took this as a gross insult and, joined by six others, beat MacCarthy into insensibility. Then the guards allowed his friends to drag him away.

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